NEM Newsletter #8
A Happy XEM Year!
Happy NEM Year!! According to the Chinese annals and fortune telling, the Year of the Goat (sheep; 乙未) falls on the 19th of February, 2015, the 4712th Chinese Year (the Chinese believe that the first King of China — not the first Emperor of China — began in 2697 B.C.; this is the year 5775 in the Hebrew calendar, the 2675th year since the founding of Japan and the 27th year of the current Japanese Emperor, and the Juche year 104 in the DPRK, among various other calendar systems). So will we launch by then or before then? This is one question only the great sheep (乙未) can answer!
Indeed, this will be the year of the NEM. Not only will it be a NEM year, XEM will be born too. Just recently, to be in line with international notation for Crypto (being prefixed by an X, like precious metal commodities), it was decided that we should name the coin denomination as XEM. However, having said that, we are not in a position to decide. But mentioned enough it should be widely adopted. Do note that this is still a NEM initiative. Only the unit of coin is denoted as XEM. The plural for XEM shall be XEM as well.
The number of XEM coins
It was finally decided that the number of XEM in circulation shall be 8,999,999,999 XEM. This means that for every 0.1 NEM Stake one owns (being the smallest denomination out there at the moment), one will be given 224,999.999975 XEM in the Nemesis Block. This works out perfectly as the number of decimal place in NEM is 6 decimals. So, for one NEM Stake, we are talking about 2,249,999.99975 XEM.
As the number of decimal places is six, this would mean that smallest denomination is 1 microXEM (µXem). The next obvious denomination is 1 mXEM (milliXEM) or perhaps we could call it 1 Makoto!
With 6 decimal places, it is easy for us to manage its value instead of it being 8 or 10 decimal places, which is hard to remember.
Proposed usage of unclaimed and sock stakes
There have been lengthy debates and deliberations on what we should do with the unclaimed and sock stakes. An internal meeting was conducted and as with the forum consensus, opinions were equally divided. However, a conclusion was made among those present and a proposal is presented for the rest of the dev team to concur. Basically the broad brush proposal is:
~10% node rewards
About 10% shall be used to reward people that run nodes. 10% would be enough for rewarding 100K XEM per day for 6 years, for people who run nodes.
~10% silver coins
About 10% shall be used to give each stakeholder the possibility to get a physical 1oz 999 silver NEM coin from the Perth Mint. The coins would be issued as assets and can either be sold on the NEM AE or redeemed for an actual NEM silver coin.
~45% community fund with strict governance
A large portion of the unclaimed and sock stakes (i.e. about 45%), shall be put into a community fund, operated as a decentralized autonomous organization. This fund would be used for projects that the community deems worthy. Anyone could come and request funding, and if the community feels it is a worthy project that will help NEM, then the project can get some funding. The exact governance for this fund is still to be discussed (dev veto, how many people in charge, who are those people, etc.) Reference point can be found here:
https://forum.nemcoin.com/ideas/nem-community-fund-(aka-nemtopia)/
~2.5% mobile app
NEM will need a mobile app in order to reach every user conveniently. To realize this, we believe about 2.5 % should be enough to develop a first class mobile app for NEM.
~32.5 % future redistribution projects
These are projects that will promote the use of NEM. We want to be able to fund projects that will ultimately “give back” to the community and the ecosystem. Some of these projects may include:
· The creation of sustainable loops (NEM ecosystem creation).
· Projects that will drive NEM further and therefore raise its value. This could be using NEM to create NEM villages or communities.
The exact governance for this fund has yet to be discussed but it will most likely be a mix of core team and community. Transparency and multi-sig use of funds are keys to successfully realizing projects. It is important to note that the proposal is to make use of this fund for the benefit of NEM and not for the benefit of the developers. Therefore, the proposal is not to put the fund into the pockets of our devs.
Having made the above proposals, we will still need concurrence from the devs in order to proceed. Technically, sock stakes are under the purview of the devs.
Progress on NEM System Development
Launch will come after the implementation of multi-sig, which is a mandatory feature, as we shall be holding a lot of unclaimed and sock stakes, as well as the development fund. For the sake of governance, this must be completed before launch.
Most of us are anxiously awaiting the NEM launch. However, we should take cognizance that the NEM initiative is a world-class initiative and therefore we should be very thorough, no matter what.
The development team has reported to us that they have more or less completed the multi-sig solution and is going to put the multi-sig into the latest Beta version soon and test it for another 3 or 4 weeks before launch.
Hopefully, if there are no major problems with the multi-sig, we should be able to launch in February. A firm date will be announced later.
We urge everyone to test the multi-sig fervently and rigorously during the Beta test period and give feedback so that all the problems can be ironed out on an urgent basis. The more extensive the test is, the sooner we can launch.
NCC User Experience
There have been many complaints about the unfriendliness of the NCC installation, error messages, and general user experience. This no doubt is a sore point and looking at the development progress and the need to launch, it is proposed that the UX/UI shall be a post-launch exercise. We hope to make good on that immediately, as we proceed on to the development of V1.
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